I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.